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5. Plot-Specific
Events & Intensity Lulls. Take the key plot points from the
story outline and rate the perceived level of intensity on the same relative
scale as the event ratings.
Dialogue-heavy plot events will fall in the low
intensity category, and will contrast quite nicely with a scripted action
event when placed just before or just after. List the plot-specific event
table in chronological order, but initially keep it separate from the
generic event table.
-
Identify potential low intensity peaks -- both generic event
and plot specific -- and slot them just before and just after the high
intensity peaks in an alternating trough, peak, trough... trough, peak, trough
rhythm.
-
Continue to chronologically layer in the main plot points
into the event table, ideally replacing and weeding out the least appealing
generic action events -- or even those that are projected to provide anomalous
intensity and fail to support your target trends. Ensure that all plot point
highs and lows have a place in this newly combined Intensity & Pacing Plan table.
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Each key action event (generic and plot-specific) will need
to be sandwiched with an intensity lull before and after in order to provide
the essential contrast described earlier. For simplicity's sake, we will not
worry so much about the intensity values of the lulls. We will only set our
criteria to ensure that there is a pair of bookend lulls before and after every
key action event within each level.
-
Layout low intensity events as low-risk instances where the
player feels safe and relaxed (e.g. level navigation, an opening of view from a
tunnel or darkness, a reveal of scenic wonder, a low-risk puzzle, item
searches, or a feeling of accomplishment), and these can be used to fill in the
lull bookends around each key action event.
The order of these
relaxed layout events should be fairly interchangeable, and because they are
generic, they can and should be reused in varying ways. If there are not enough
low intensity lulls to sandwich every action event, then mark a generic
placeholder lull in that spot.
This will communicate to the level designers and/or
mission scripters that there needs to be a break in action, and a sequence of
low-risk/low tension calm or humor for some period around each key
action-intense event.
-
Typically once the plot points are set in the context of a
location, the story can be evolved further for the best fit. Take another pass
at the plot outline to resolve any anomalies and to make improvements and
stronger connections with the environment location where possible. This would
be a good point to lay out any mission objectives for that level since they
will inform the plot outline and vice versa.
6. Time Metrics. In a new column set some time metrics for each level so you know
roughly how far apart each action event should be in time.
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Always set the target time length for levels to be either
all the same or all increasing (during production you can allow maybe 5%
variance but set the targets more strictly), as discussed in the earlier
progression article. A valuable trend opportunity that is commonly missed
is to leave the length of levels/missions haphazard and have them end up
randomly erratic.
-
Do not worry about spacing the low intensity troughs too
strictly by time/distance or about sequencing their magnitude as precisely as
the peaks; just make sure that you have low intensity events (troughs) or
placeholder lulls to bookend every major action event (peak) to provide
contrast to the action. Wherever possible, replace each placeholder lull with a
specific segment of low-risk travel, revealing scenic wonder, or similar
tension-reducing event that makes sense in the given level location.
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The intervals between peaks within a level should all be the
same or increasingly closer in duration. If you are going for a more advanced
and complex increasing pace of peaks, (Figure 5) the first event interval
in each new level should be reset to that of the prior level, or perhaps just
slightly faster, to maintain enough range to make the changes noticeable.
 Fig. 5: Relative Intensity Graph of a TV Drama Series (Amplitude
Increasing for Greatest Contrast)
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If you are going for an increasing level length, then
you will likely have to add events after a few levels to keep the intensity
peak interval the same or only slightly increased. You might also start from
fewer main intensity events (say two or three for level 1 and up to five or six
for the final level).
-
To help visualize the pacing trends, it will be useful to add
time gridlines to the graph (say in 30-second increments) to clarify the peak
intervals and the ideal pace rhythms.
7. Top-Down Trend
Evaluation. Step back from the levels and view the distribution of
intensity from one level to the next over the entire campaign, both in the
Intensity & Pacing Plan
table and visually through the graph of the data.
-
Verify that you have increasing intensity trends from level
to level as in Figure 8. Also identify anomalous points that disrupt or
weaken those trends (say one event decreases, stays the same, or has a very
slight increase in intensity compared to the one before it -- see the example
table below).
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Discuss ways to adjust/evolve the high level design of the
event in question so that it fits closer to the ideal intensity level (adding
or reducing action elements, geo, hazards, props or enemies to produce the
desired intensity rankings).
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It is important to iterate the Intensity & Pacing Plan at this point so that you can further
improve the set intensity targets and trends that you will need to work
towards. Because the implementation ratings will differ from the projected
ratings, you need not make your projected ratings perfectly hit all the
projected intensity targets on paper. Just get as close as possible, and ensure
that the appropriate increasing trends are upheld as in the table below.
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As a long-time software project manager, though, I'd like to gently note that the team scenarios painted for this article are somewhat best-case. That's not wrong for an article of this length -- it does no harm to promote the benefits of improving the pacing design process.
But it's worth bearing in mind that, as with any intersection between neatly defined processes and messy, individualistic human beings, there are numerous ways in which the locomotive can start to go off the tracks. Here are just a couple.
Brainstorming: Some people are naturally hardwired to prefer seeing the problems with other people's ideas, as opposed to generating ideas of their own. These folks are valuable, but they're more valuable later in the process. When coming up with an initial set of ideas, it can be useful to make it clear to everyone that the time for applying critical judgement will come later -- the "idea assassins" need to hold their fire during the brainstorming phase in order to encourage the more sensitive members of a team to participate. This improves the odds that there'll be enough distinct ideas generated to cover the range of intensities required in level design.
Buy-in: While teambuilding is useful, buy-in (i.e., enthusiasm management) often needs to be handled on a individual basis in order to effectively address the "ownership problem." In any development project, some members are likely to be the type of person whose sense of self-worth is intimately connected to the work they do. In these cases, it can be hard to walk the fine line between encouraging these often highly productive individuals to fully invest, and allowing them to feel they (and not the project) "own" whatever work they're assigned. While investment is desirable, these individuals will often believe that their agreeing to invest in some task constitutes an agreement on your part to let them perform that task however they want to do it. Any subsequent effort on your part to change or cut that task for intensity or pacing needs will be considered a betrayal of that supposed contract, and can result in persistent arguments, emotional confrontations, sullenness (and substandard work), denigration of your competence (creating an "us versus them" atmosphere among team members), and potentially the loss of a productive worker. It's not always possible to manage these individuals; what's important is recognizing that they exist and that they make achieving the goal of buy-in more complex than simply getting everyone to be enthusiastic about the project.
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I'm completely on board with the goals described in this article, particularly the top-level goal of using a well-defined process for achieving emotionally satisfying pacing in level design. Following some form of the process suggested is indeed likely to yield better results, both artistically and commercially, than proceeding directly to implementation and hoping to iterate toward quality in time to meet a scheduled ship date.
It's just useful to recognize that some people seem to enjoy sticking their thumbs in the metaphorical eye of processes, no matter how good those processes may be. (Creative types may be especially prone to this.)
So by all means, follow the process ideas described here. Just be ready to handle the many forms of resistance, both overt and covert, that always occur when trying to persuade actual human beings to follow a process.
RE: Buy-In. The key with those emotionally invested and productive workers is to get them to assist their design peers in forming the layout of the Plan prior to assigning the ownership. This way all should feel the helped shape the Big Picture. It is also equally important to let them know that on top of the pacing structure there is still an ample creative space in which they will be able to express themselves through the bulk of the level design and implementation details.
You definitely want to do the intensity ratings as a group.
It seems to me that 95% of the time in a horror movie the viewer knows *when* scares are going to come but often the joy comes in how interesting and unexpected the depicted event situation is. If you really want to surprise the player then you can establish a pacing rhythm that runs like clockwork and then you intentionally but temporarily break that rhythm once the player has gotten used to it for a shocking surprise. Another technique is to establish a seeming low-risk lull and then to morph the situation instantly into a high-risk event. Surprise events should not be done in the same spatial realm as normal events (i.e. don't have a closed path leading to a clearing or open space where you would expect an event to happen).
Film and TV are also art forms and Hollywood has been successfully structuring pacing and intensity for years and leveraging cinematic techniques to steer the viewer's emotions.
There are no rules that say creativity is mutually exclusive to structured pacing. Only a fear or process change will keep us from realizing the successes of the top Hollywood blockbusters.
Well that's just an opinion to consider.
I'm really impressed with your article, and I wholly agree with the notion that game- and level design should be a structured process.
The problem is that pacing in an action game, even a "pure" action game with simple rules, is much more complex than the standard "crosscut saw" shape.
We did some research on pacing in Call of Duty 4. I don't have data nor results at home, but it's crazy stuff, really. Most of all, it's not one-dimensional. We started having constructive results only after we assumed intensity has two dimensions: tension (the feeling of not being in control of your own circumstance, e.g. the sense of danger) and chaos (the feeling of not being able to follow changes of your environment, e.g. the sense of everything happening "too fast").
These two use distinct kinds of surprise. "Tense" surprise is a sudden realisation: a pair of bombers is coming and they're going to sink the ship you're riding. You can't even see them, but you know what they mean. "Chaotic" surprise is a sudden perception: something explodes within your field of view. You have to see it in order to experience it. If a fuel tank explodes a mile away, it may just as well not exist.
Only tense surprises are "real". Chaotic surprises are perceived as noises. A key of jets flies right over your head, and you won't even notice them (I know I didn't). But when you're starting to slip out from the rescue helicopter you've just jumped on, and for a fraction of second captain Price seems not to notice - that's something you're likely to be still keeping in your memory in a few years' time. Jets are flashy, and yet they're irrelevant. But if Price doesn't grab your hand (and for a split second you're thinking that's the case), then you're going to die.
The biggest problem about this is that the sudden realisation can be anything. The realisation comes from a conjunction of meanings. If you arrange your meanings properly, you can convince the player to care about, say, a dog, or a lighthouse, or a rock. The very last scene in Call of Duty 4 is very ordinary in terms of eye candy, but it works the way it does because it's preceded by two other scenes (10% and 50% into the game), in which you die. You're expecting to die again, and then you don't. But if those two scenes weren't there, you would never expect to die, because the action game convention says you can't (you're the protagonist, after all). Most of the impact of the game is achieved by careful manipulation of various meanings, and not by pacing or intensity.
They didn't use the crosscut saw in Call of Duty 4. The most intense moment is the cutscene after nukes are launched. Everything afterwards is an exercise in successful damage control, starting with the immediate following mission, where the main relief is the sheer fact that the nukes haven't hit their targets yet. You're still in the game.
As far as CoD4 goes, there's no rule with regard to tension or chaos curve. Sometimes it has a peak in the middle of level progress. Sometimes it has two peaks: one in the beginning, and the other at the end. Sometimes it's flat. The most intense missions in Call of Duty 4 use relatively flat chaos curves, and flat tension curves with a lot of spikes in them. They're intense because of the resonance between the spikes. That's not so much pacing as timing.
Their core combat loop during urban warfare sequences is 45-60 seconds of heavy fighting followed by a "deep breath". This is usually something as small as a short corridor between roomfuls of enemies, or a staircase. If you just keep walking, it doesn't last for more than a second or two. But if you do stop, you can stay there for a few minutes and nothing is going to hurt you. Formally speaking, it's a high-intensity encounter followed by another high-intensity encounter, and then another one, and another. But in fact the pacing is completely under player's control. If you're feeling tired, you just stop and take as many deep breaths as you need.
An argument in your favour: all of their turning points are very structured, because they were implemented with the same "stepladder" progression. Each turning point is a pair of events. The first one is a "tense" surprise: somebody tells you your ship is going to be bombed. It does rise the tension, but it usually doesn't change the chaos level. Only after the sudden realisation sinks into your mind, when you're finally understanding what's going to happen to you, the second event happens, and all the hell breaks loose. That's the sudden perception. There's fire everywhere, the water is pouring in, and the ship is starting to lean on the side. It's not a surprise, because you knew it would happen. It works because you knew.
The absolute masterpiece of tension control is the Chernobyl mission, and you only give a handful of shots in it. The most intense moment in that mission happens when a bunch of soldiers pass by. You're in control. You don't even have to move much. But they're passing very, very close to you. One of them could step on you. The mission ends with an interlude, rather than a peak. The most action-oriented event of that part of game happens at the beginning of the next mission, and you trigger it consciously all by yourself.
I don't think pacing is the ultimate goal of a game, even if it's a simple first person shooter. Pacing is important, but it's only a tool, and it should be used differently for different goals. But I do think that a process similar to the one you described is crucial to successful development, because it allows the team to choose their goal and stick with it.
What makes pacing more difficult for games than it is for TV and films is that with the non-interactive media, the creators can assume that the participent is going to be viewing from start to end in one sitting. This is a luxury game designers don't have, as all players play at a different pace.
Certainly the increasing wave pace is not the only viable one. CoD4 did an awesome job capturing the chaos of war and if chaos is a key objective like that on-going spikes seem to have worked quite well.
For teams that do not have the experience of several iterations in the genre it might be harder to figure out their pacing type and it would serve them well to consider the Hollywood type structure I proposed is the alternative is no structure at all.
Thanks again for your excellent insight.
However, I disagree with the claims that thrown-out content is universally a bad thing. I can think of some valid reasons, even good reasons to throw away content, and lots of it. Maybe I'm being a bit nit-picky here, but the expectation that no content should ever be thrown out is be a very dangerous one, for both scheduling and gameplay quality.
Design Iteration
It can be difficult to predict what the most fun parts of your game are going to be. Write as many design docs as you want, once you have a playable experience everything changes. It is very useful to purposely create a bunch of "throw away" content early in the process to get a feel for things, find out what’s fun and what isn't, and help steer the forward direction of the game. It’s better to find out something is a flawed idea with quick throw-away content, than discover it late in the project in the midst of final content production.
Planning
It is tremendously useful to sketch out portions of the game with throw-away art, content, and even programming. This may catch some serious technical or design issues early on, and clarify what needs to be done. If you plan on getting things right the first time, you'll end up married to the mistakes you'll inevitably make. The lessons learned with throw-away content will allow you to appropriately schedule the game, and will make the final version much better.
Content Pipeline
One of the many difficulties of making a game is that there is a whole lot of design, gameplay programming, and tools work to be done before you can even begin creating the final content. But these things don't magically appear out of a hat. The content team is, and should get their hands dirty way before the content pipeline is 100% production ready. Sure, this creates all sorts of headaches as the tools, gameplay, data formats, and design are all in constant flux as content is being created. And you're pretty much forced to throw away this early content. Or, if you try to save it, it will probably cost you more time, and be inferior quality than if you just scrap it, and recreate better content later on once you have more focused design and better tool support.
Still, it is critical for the content pipeline to be used as it is being built. Your content team is the client for this pipeline, and they need time to learn it, and provide critique as it develops. By the time the pipeline is finished, it will be fire-tested, and the content team will be trained up and bought into the process. Most importantly, the content team has had a chance to experiment and make mistakes before creating the real content for the game. You'll be able to hit the ground running at full speed.
Unfortunately, this means a lot of content gets thrown away, but I would argue this is a worthwhile cost.
I do agree with Mike Lopez on the merits of intensity and pacing planning. But it isn't a magic bullet that will make "wasted" content disappear. Good planning will help prevent radical design and vision changes down the road, which is certainly a good thing. But it doesn't abolish the need for throw-away content.
You need a good process. But a little (or a lot) of "content chaos" and experimentation in the initial stages will make your game a lot better in the long run.
However, the majority of the cost of content being thrown away is inflicted when the first proper review of a large chunk of content is performed too late. For instance, a level turns out to be no fun after it's been fully built. This could easily cost your team several thousand man-hours, which is probably more than most teams spend on all of their throwaway prototypes.
In other words, you can and should afford to throw away a few meshes, but you cannot afford for them to have ten thousand polys each. You can throw away a piece of code, but not after you've asked the programmer to handle all the exceptions and edge cases.
Even worse are instances when a game goes into production after the team has skipped design, planning and prototype phases. You build half of your levels, and only then you realize that half of your weapons are too strong while the other half are useless, your enemies are boring, and the custom action set you invented for your protagonist doesn't work. The final game becomes a de facto prototype, and that's just stupid.
The problem comes when as Jacek says the content is nearly complete and still is not fun. Or the level does not support the core mechanics well and has to be scraped. In other cases it may be related to late changes in engine technical requirements (do it all in 20% less memory). Scrapping a single level early on with rough art and low detail is no big deal. Scrapping all the environments and/or missions towards the end of production is a nightmare for the schedule, level production costs and ultimately the gameplay quality (more time implementing levels means less time polishing).
Sean you make some great points about new technology and about experimentation in levels which I agree with completely (I have actually been sketching out another article on the importance of *early production* level design experimentation in defining what I call "Patterns of Fun" that should be varied throughout all the levels).
Just my opinion.
I have done some quick research about quality and the user perception once, and there is some insight i had which may help .
Pacing is important but it wouldn't raise "the perceive quality" of game, it only remove "the defect". A well pace game is "expected" by consumer as a given, removing an annoyance doesn't make it "good" just "ok" or "acceptable". The element that would add quality is "timing", it is a subtle difference but it make a difference. So we need such a method as a given for basic quality, it's a very good article and I'm rather stun that's it is not use in our industry.
Everybody assume that because somethings is art or creative you won't use "guideline" which is awfully wrong as art is literally full of process and techniques, but they are so ingrained in the act that we don't pay attention anymore.
Animation which is about "expressing souls" is one of the most "normative art" and still can express a lot of things, principally because of the process. Animation became an major art form when Disney maked "snow white" and it could have done it because he had created "normative" tools such as storyboards, exposure sheet and model sheets. §It had permit sharing a creative vision and doing large scale quality project with depth and sensibilities,beyond the comical immediate fun that was given, just like Video game, cartoon was suppose to be FUN!. Maybe we should look more closely animation than movies for insight on production process (animation is after all still heavy from design to 24 images seconds the 1 hour and a half movies)?
Jaceck also made a very insightful distinction, great comment! I may try to add something. What he had called "tense" and "chaos" are known elsewhere as "cognitive" and "visceral" and you can apply it to more than pacing. There is many great artist in video game, we have great looking character with a lot of "visceral" appeal, but they are view as "bland" because they lack "cognitive appeal" (the concept behind them is not interesting). A character like James BOND is everlasting because of his cognitive aspect ( a contrasting concept of the "playboy" (not discrete and connect with people) is a "spy"(discrete and hidden from people) with license to kill people) contrary to Rambo (a “soldier” that “kills peoples”, no contrast) which ages very quickly despite good visceral appeal. Call of duty 4 was interesting because it subtly subvert a lot of expectation concerning a war game (not always about shooting, and most discussion around me about the game is whether it is a glorification or a denunciation of present days wars, maybe it was not intended but it had helped the game to get into the mind!
Portal is an exemple of game well paced (room give unity of place, time and challenge) with good timing and also having good "visceral" appeal (moving through portal) and "cognitive" appeal (the cake is a lie, the weigthed companion cube, the concept of the portal gun GLADOS). And it does so despite not so original settings (dystopian future with bad robots) but it is such a design!
I hope this comment helped broaden the scope of the excellant article and the no less exellant comment of Jaceck
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kano_model